That scripting in Python is pretty bad. It makes thing harder and at the same time you still have to think a lot about what can go wrong, because there's no enforced error handling.
> "Scripting" in a compiled language is not practical.
The premise is that scripts grow, and you should switch to Python. Which might be okay for Google, but seems to be only a very small step up from Bash, if any at all. (I've outlined the reasons, why I think it's not worth it.)
I do a lot of scripting, in Bash, and when that stars to grow on me, it's time to think about the problem for real. And usually a blind rewrite in Python is not the way to go.
> For some tasks that's perfectly sensible.
Those are the one-off scripts, no? Anything that should run with some regularity, anything that should be reproducible, that handles valuable data, is not something that should be cobbled together in bash/python and thrown into /etc/cron.d . Or apparently that's how Google rolls.
Yeah, well, maybe not everyone is an SRE, so the use case here seems to be build scripts and other not-so-critical scripts, that still have to be maintained, where knowledge of Bash/POSIX-sh is not really assumed, it should just work for anyone who checks out the repo.
It's a complete scripting language, with tons of features, from a comprehensive standard library with something for most needs, to a packaging system, isolated environments, async io, and more. And lots of expressivity in structuring your program (including optional types).
So, not sure what the above "and that's it" means. That it's not Haskell? Yes, it's not.
>Setting up the Python environment requires something, because Python comes in many flavors (2 vs 3, system installed, user installed, /usr/local) and there are a bunch of factors (pip, pyenv, pipenv, PYTHONPATH, current directory with modules, requirement for python-dev headers, and GCC to compile native parts of packages, and then of course maybe extra shared libraries too) that can affect the "script".
If you're doing dev-ops with such scripts, you already need to handle the environment in general.